The Last Man

by P. T. Deutermann

  Was that someone still alive?

  The hallway was too dark for him to see much other than the slick smudges on the marble. Slick, but also sticky. Not fresh blood, then. He reached the larger guards’ room and saw what he needed, a small oil lamp burning high up in a niche on the outer wall. All he would have to do would be to roll a few amphorae of oil into the audience chamber, crack the seals, and ignite the oil.

  There were windows in the guards’ room, and it was definitely growing lighter outside than in. He could see the clouds of smoke rolling past, looking like huge amorphous ghosts on a mission of vengeance. The sound of the kettledrums penetrated this end of the palace. Very soon now, he thought.

  He reached high and picked off the oil lamp. Turning around, he froze. The gaunt, soot-streaked face of another man stared back at him from the gloom of a corner in the room. Not just any face: It was Eleazar himself.

  Judah raised the tiny oil lamp to make sure. “You?” he gasped. “How can this be?”

  Eleazar was a lean and intense warrior who had led the defense of Masada from the beginning. He was not much younger than Judah, and he was a descendant of that Judah who had instigated a tax revolt against Cyrenius, which had in turn led to the formation of the Sicarii. Judah was suddenly furious that Eleazar, of all men on the mountain, had failed to keep the covenant, the one he had preached in the first place. He lifted the oil lamp higher, better to look into the leader’s gaunt face. He noted that Eleazar’s sleeves and shins were bloody, but there was no other mark upon him. When he thought about the sights he had witnessed in the outer precincts of the fortress, and the catastrophe that lay beyond in the great hall, he trembled with anger.

  “It is still an eligible thing to die after a glorious manner?” he growled, throwing Eleazar’s earlier words back at him. “And after we have slain them, let us bestow that glorious benefit mutually and preserve ourselves in freedom? Glorious benefit?”

  Eleazar wouldn’t look at him, nor would he speak. He stared down at the white tiles of the guards’ room, his hands empty in his lap, his mouth set in a grim, flat line. Judah moved closer, his right hand closing on the haft of his dagger.

  “You said these things,” he spat. “You convinced them—you convinced all of us—to kill ourselves to spite the Roman beast. ‘Where now is that great city that was believed to have God himself inhabiting therein?’ you said. ‘It is now demolished to the very foundations, where unfortunate old men lie upon the ashes of the Temple, and a few women are there preserved alive, for our bitter shame and reproach’? Were these not your words?”

  Eleazar still refused to look at him. “I couldn’t do it,” he said softly. He shook his head, slowly, from side to side, as if amazed at his own cowardice. “I could not bring myself to do it.”

  Judah drew the long dagger and pointed it down at Eleazar’s wan face. Eleazar raised his eyes and made a gesture of resignation with his hands. In one swift movement, executed too many times throughout his career as a professional assassin, Judah stabbed down, impaling Eleazar just below the breastbone.

  “‘Let us make haste to die bravely,’” Judah roared, as he pushed the blade deeper, ignoring Eleazar’s mortal, convulsive groan and desperately grasping hands. “‘Let us pity ourselves, our children, and our wives, while it is in our power to show pity to them. Let us go out of the world in a state of freedom!’”

  Eleazar’s back arched in agony, the blood now running like a river from his open mouth, his feet kicking helplessly alongside Judah’s legs.

  “‘Let us die before we become slaves under our enemies,’” Judah recited, as he twisted the blade, severing every vital link to life within Eleazar’s body, “‘and let us go out of this world, together with our children and our wives, in a state of freedom, so that we leave an example which shall at once cause their astonishment at our death, and their admiration at our hardiness.’”

  Eleazar collapsed back against the wall, a great wheezing, bubbling sigh escaping from his mouth and nose as the blood slowed, his eyes fixed now in that rigid contemplation known only to the dead.

  Judah withdrew the blade and straightened up, exhaling forcefully. His arm was shaking, and he found himself weeping. He had followed this man through the hell of civil war, the immolation of the Jewish state and most of its population, and finally the long and dreadful siege in this God-forsaken place, only to have Eleazar, the commander, the leader, the fiery heart of the revolt, lose his nerve? He could not abide it.

  A gust of wind blew smoke into the palace, stirring once again the reek of mass death coming from down the passageways. The rumble of the drums seemed to be growing louder. The formations must be massing down below the ramp.

  An hour at the most until dawn. It was time to fire the palace. Then he would slip down the Serpent Path to the great cistern. To his own end. Unlike Eleazar, he had no doubts that he could do what he must. He was anxious to die.

  * * *

  Judah had to lower himself on a rope over the eastern parapets, the gate to the Serpent Path having long been sealed by the defenders. He felt doubly exposed as he slid down, because this was the sunrise side of the mountain. The Zealots had seen Roman patrols on the Serpent Path, but always down toward the bottom. General Silva had allowed the path itself to remain open in hopes of encouraging defections from the mountain. He had closed it only after discovering that Jews were using it to join the defenders.

  He crunched down into the loose sand and gravel below the walls and flipped the rope a couple of times until the special knot let go, dropping the full length of it at his feet. He gathered it up and trudged down the path, moving from boulder to boulder as best he could, stopping to listen for the tramp of Roman sandals. The air was fresher here, as the diurnal winds prepared to change. The smells were no longer of death and smoke but of brine and long-burned sand. He reached the tiny cave, dragging the coil of rope behind him to smooth out his tracks, and then stepped inside. There had been a rain two weeks ago, and the sand on the floor of the cave was still wet.

  He stopped to rest, very much aware now that the opening of the cave was gray against the darkness inside. Soon the Romans would advance up the siege ramp. What a sight they would find! He had never found the missing children and the two women. Perhaps they had taken refuge in one of the dry cisterns at the southern end of the fortress. A few inconsequential survivors wouldn’t be all bad, he thought. The Romans would find them and hear firsthand what had befallen their triumph. Then, unfortunately, they’d throw them off the ramparts.

  It was time. He went to the back of the cave and began to dig away the sand until he exposed the hole into the great cavern. It was covered with a closely fitted wooden hatch, which he was able to pull up, turn on its side, and then drop through the hole. It took a frighteningly long time before he heard the crash of splintering boards below. The cavern was at least sixty cubits from the ceiling to the floor. Then he moved more sand, exposing the heavy stone slab that had been buried next to the hole. It was much too heavy for one man to move without levers, but they had prepositioned five small round logs under it to serve as rollers. On the top was an iron ring, bolted to an iron shaft that penetrated the slab. There was a smaller ring on the bottom side. He attached the rope to this underside ring. Then he rolled the slab over to the very edge of the hole, leaving enough room for him to climb through. He used his sandals to sweep mounds of sand right next to the hole and on top of the slab, so that the sand would fall in behind the stone and conceal it.

  He sat for a moment on the edge of the hole. Once he lowered himself onto the rope, the slab would begin to move. He would have a few seconds to get beneath it before it rolled into the cambered hole, sealing him into the cave forever.

  It was well and truly over. His entire life. Old as he was, he could still remember it all, even as far back as the heady days in Galilee when he’d joined the wild bunch, after having been expelled from his family and his village for mocking the religious pretensions of
his older brother. The expulsion, when he was just fifteen years old, had come as no surprise, really. He had been a rebellious child from the first, a fighter and a scrapper and much more interested in hunting and trapping in the hills than in boring scripture and the study of long-dead prophets. Increasingly forced to endure endless lectures on how much better his older brother was, how much more worthy, devoted, scripturally brilliant, such a good son, all of it, he jumped at the chance to join the small band of ruffian teenagers who roamed the northern hills of Galilee, living off the land and the occasional stolen herd animal. His parents had renounced him and stricken his name, while his brother, the saint, went off to study with the priests and scholars about minutiae in the holy book.

  He stopped to listen. Something was different. The drums. The drums had stopped. He closed his eyes and recaptured the images from the palace above and the desperate, bloody hovels in the casemates, the glorious defenders of Jewish honor and history reduced now to sodden lumps of carrion.

  For a moment, his faith in the cause almost broke.

  Implacable Rome. Vengeful Rome. Divine Rome. Conquerors of the whole world, masters of the visible horizon who even called the entire middle sea Mare Nostrum, our sea. Challenged by tiny, insignificant Judaea.

  They had been mad to even imagine they could break the Roman yoke.

  It was time to end it. The treasures were secure. The people’s testaments were all collected at the bottom. The Romans were coming.

  He sighed, grabbed the rope, turned sideways, put his weight on it, and slid down beneath the edges of the slab hole. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the slab responded, moving toward his face as he slid farther down beneath the rectangular opening, the wooden rollers dropping through, banging off his shoulders, and then the slab seating with a granitic, sandy thump, leaving him suspended in utter darkness. The roller logs crashed down onto the rock floor of the cavern a very long way beneath him. He listened and thought he could hear the whispering flow of sand covering the slab. Hand over hand, his fingers clutching the rough knots, he lowered himself into stygian darkness.

  He continued to slide down the rope until his sandals came up against the big knot at the bottom. He could see absolutely nothing; the darkness was profound. He tried to visualize the great sphere of the cavern but had no way to orient himself, so he began to swing, pumping the rope back and forth until he was swinging through the darkness, initially in one line but then in a sweeping circle, wider and wider, until he finally felt his feet bang up against the rock wall. He kept it up, expanding the arc, until one of his feet engaged the scaffolding wall they had erected. It was a lashed pole-and-crosspiece affair, rising from the floor of the cavern to the entrance of the side cave.

  He lost it and then found it again. It took three more tries before he could hook a foot into the lattice of the ladder and stop his swing. He was puffing from the exertion and took a minute to regain his breath. He was now hanging like a hammock, his feet locked around the ladder structure while the rest of his body hung out over the blackness as he gripped the rope. He considered just letting go. It was some forty cubits to the floor of the cavern, certainly far enough down to smash the life out of him when he landed. There were two more things he had to do, however, and they had to be done in the cave.

  He extended his feet through the lattice, hooked his knees, and then let go of the rope. He felt it swing back out into the center of the cave, his last connection to the world above gone forever. He raised himself on the scaffolding and began to climb in the total darkness, visualizing the ladder wall and the tiny cave entrance in his mind from the times before. Then there had been torches. When he got up to the top lattice of the scaffolding, he felt his way along it until the lip of the side cave entrance came under his hands. He stepped up onto the top of the lattice, swung around it, and crawled into the narrow tunnel. Keeping his head low, he eased his way up the tunnel on hands and knees until he felt the tunnel widen as it opened into the cave itself.

  He stood up then and reached into the leather pouch at his waist. He carefully extracted the smoldering ember of wood he’d taken from the palace and blew on it. One end glowed red, revealing just the tips of his fingers. From a second compartment in the pouch he took a twist of lint that he had dipped in lamp oil. He pressed it to the ember and blew on it steadily until the lint flamed. Holding it upside down, he found the first of the oil pot lamps on the wall of the cave and lit it. Using that lamp he lit the rest, until he had a dozen flickering lamps going, their tiny lights throwing eerie shadows onto the walls. He walked across the sloping floor of the cave to the wooden altar where the Temple artifacts gleamed in the lamplight. Then he bent down and probed the sand beneath the altar with his dagger until he felt it hit something solid. He dug in the sand with his fingers and extracted a small, unadorned bronze wine bowl. Straightening up, he poured all the dry sand out of the bowl and held it in both hands, overwhelmed once again by a flood of memories. Holding the bowl in one hand, he picked up a piece of charcoal and began to write on the wall.

  When he had finished writing his testament, the oil lamps were guttering. He stood up by the altar and faced the entrance to the cave. He bent down and positioned the haft of his dagger in a crack in the cave’s floor with the blade pointed straight up. He took one final deep breath, stiffened his back and his arms, and fell forward like an old tree.

  He never felt the floor of the cave smash him in the face. Instead he felt a white-hot lance of pain transfix his consciousness even as it paralyzed that final deep breath in his chest. He opened his eyes but could not see. So this is what it felt like, all those men he had killed. A roaring red haze gathered in his mind. His last thought was that he was dying exactly like a Roman general who has been defeated on the battlefield. For some strange reason, he found that amusing. He tried to laugh, to make one last time that most human of sounds, but he could not.

  Part II

  Tel Aviv, Israel

  1

  David Hall took a final standing stretch at his seat before sitting back down and refastening his seat belt. The beauty queen masquerading as an El Al stewardess had slunk through first class to tell each of the ten passengers individually and somewhat breathlessly that the captain would soon be turning on the seat-belt sign in preparation for landing at Ben Gurion Airport. David had paid close attention to her every word and the effect they had on her quivering superstructure. At these prices she better be a beauty queen, he thought, although one look back into the coach section upon boarding had confirmed the wisdom of electing first class. The crowd back there was somewhat eclectic.

  It was early afternoon as the Airbus descended toward Tel Aviv over the eastern Mediterranean. Virgil’s famously wine-dark sea glittered out the window, except that it was a deep blue, edged with precisely aligned, spidery whitecaps. The sea actually looked chilly. Well, why not, he thought. It was the first week in September, which meant that he would be visiting Israel four weeks before the major religious holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, compliments of careful planning. Landing and getting through security, immigration, and customs would be the first hurdles, especially with some of his special equipment. He had all the proper paperwork, which was good because the Israelis were extremely thorough about entry paperwork. The portable computer and his scuba regulator pack should not be a problem. Some of the seismic sensor stuff might attract attention, but it was pretty well disguised as part of his underwater camera equipment. Besides, everything had made it through the equally strict El Al security inspection back at Dulles, so he was fairly confident he would get it past the security people here in Tel Aviv. Immigration would be relatively pro forma for an American tourist, and customs, well, who ever knew about customs.

  He swallowed as the cabin pressure was adjusted. He caught the beauty queen looking at him. In her tight-fitting uniform she could adjust the cabin pressure just by sitting down, he thought. He smiled at her and she smiled back, but it was a professional smile
and not any indication of interest, he decided. He turned away, looking out the window for a first glimpse of Israel, but there was only the sea, a bit closer as the big jet bumped gently through light coastal clouds. He’d been planning this thing for a year now, ever since Adrian had disappeared. It still made his spine tingle when he thought about what he was going to attempt here and what he might discover on that haunted mountain down at the literal bottom of the world.

  * * *

  “He’s here,” the man with the pockmarked face breathed into the public pay phone, his face averted from the shuffling crowd of bleary-eyed tourists streaming past him from the customs hall.

  “Anyone meet him besides his driver?”

  “No. Shall I follow them out to the car, or are we done here?”

  “You know the answer to that one.”

  “Just thought I’d ask.”

  “Shall I run that question by the boss for you?”

  “Thank you, no.” The man in the phone booth was silent for a moment. “I’ll confirm him in the car, and again at the hotel.”

  “Yes, you will.”

  The watcher mouthed a silent insult, hung up, and hastened down the carpeted aisle of the customs area, keeping the big American and his driver in sight over the shoulders of the milling tourists. He thought this was all something of a waste of time: What did they think this American was going to do, jump in a sherut at the last minute and whisk off to Amman to see the king? According to his supervisor, they had the American’s official Israeli government itinerary, his hotel, his driver—what the hell was the big deal? A nobody nuclear engineer turned whistle-blower who was now famous in Washington for winning a seven-figure settlement after suing his former employer for wrongful termination. Coming to Israel to play amateur archaeologist, do some skindiving, and then go home. Ridiculous. Who could care? He wondered again whom he had pissed off to get a shit detail like this on a Friday afternoon.